Two Evangelical Converts Build Their Own Church in Buenos Aires

The chapter offers an analysis of two sources. The first follows the personal testimony of the conversion of an Argentine middle-class man, Matías Fernández Quinquela, an accountant for the Argentine National Congress. This account was originally published in English in the journal of the Anglican South American Missionary Society and contains a very typical exposition of the personal reflections of doubt and dissatisfaction with Catholicism as well as the atheistic positivist freethinking that led educated people, like Quinquela, to look for an alternative in Protestantism. The second offers an account of the proselytizing activities of M. F. Quinquela's wife, Carlota Lubin, and her arrest by order of a Catholic priest in a suburb of Buenos Aires. The story was published in a local magazine, La Reforma. The story demonstrates the active and provocative militancy with which these converts spread their message, the irritation they provoked in the Catholic Church, and the informal power ties between priests and local government office. The Quinquelas were convinced of the possibilities of moral and social renewal that evangelical Protestantism could offer Argentine society.